After Doris Kearns Goodwin's husband died about six years ago, the couple's home, a 19th-century farmhouse in Concord, Massachusetts, no longer felt right.
“We spent 20 years there.” said Kearns Goodwin, 81, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose new book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” will be published April 16.
“It was a house we loved, and in many ways it was a house we built together.” She continued by mentioning several improvements, including turning her three-car garage into her library and adding a tower inspired by her husband's home. Galileo's charm.
The backyard had a softly gurgling fountain, a curved wooden bench, flowering plants, and a pond with koi fish. Inside, there were about 10,000 books, sorted by category and topic, spread out on shelves in almost every room. “Everything we loved was there,” said Kearns Goodwin.
But suddenly I felt that the house was too big. And wherever she went, she saw her husband of 42 years, Richard N. Goodwin. He was a special assistant to President John F. Kennedy in his twenties and a Zelig-like figure who developed a lasting friendship with Jackie Kennedy. , in his 30s, was a speechwriter and advisor to Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy. “Mr. Goodwin called himself the voice of the 1960s, and with good reason,” his obituary in The New York Times read.
“One of my sons lives in Concord and he saw how difficult it was for me so he came and brought his two granddaughters,” Kearns Goodwin said. “But Dick missed it so much that he decided to put the house on the market.”
Doris Kearns Goodwin, 81
job: historian, biographer
Lecture volume: “I made too many mistakes when choosing which books to gift. I have kept many biographies, but there are so many I have missed. Now I keep saying, ‘Where is that book?’”
Moving to nearby Boston was a no-brainer. “I actually wanted to move to the city when I married Dick,” she said. “I grew up on Long Island and loved New York. “The Concorde was our great compromise.”
Joe, the youngest of three sons, settled in a high-rise condo with his family. So I knew the building and I liked it. Kearns Goodwin, who bought a three-bedroom apartment with panoramic views of Beantown, said: There she wrote ‘The Unfinished Love Story’, a compilation of her memoir, biography and history.
Mr. Kearns Goodwin's primary source was the 300 boxes of letters, postcards, documents, diaries, newspaper clippings, photographs and other ephemera that Dick Goodwin collected during the mid-20th century and unknowingly shoved into storage, cellars. More than 50 years after building the barn, he found each cache and shared them with his very enthusiastic wife.
“As a historian, I was really happy to see them. “It had everything they wanted in an archive,” said Kearns Goodwin. “They were pieces from the ‘60s that I really wanted to know more about.”
A cancer diagnosis and the subsequent debilitating and futile treatment interfered with Mr. Goodwin's plans to document that turbulent period. After his death Mr. Kearns Goodwin took over the project.
She had the original material, but also needed a setting that replicated the Concord study in a new condo. The mise-en-scène includes a nicely worn blue leather sofa, a low chestnut table with plenty of space for books, a side table and a rug that Mrs. Kearns Goodwin brought from Morocco when she attended the 40th anniversary of the Casablanca Conference. Meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1943.
“It was the only way I could work,” said Kearns Goodwin. “It was like a talisman in a way. There was a little nook so it felt like I was still in Concord, even though I was in a different room in a different building.”
Her fans are probably familiar with the bookshelf behind the sofa. You can see this when she is interviewed at her home. She consistently scores 10s. room raterThis is, at least in part, due to her decorative refrain from displaying her publications.
Other pieces of Concord House are scattered around the apartment. Among them are several Persian rugs and an octagonal Indian coffee table. The bookshelves that were in her old foyer are at the entrance to the condo. The book still contains a first edition and miniature replica of the Revolutionary War battles of Lexington and Concord at Northbridge. Kearns Goodwin said her 5-year-old grandson sometimes plays with the toy soldiers as he adjusts the direction of his little legs.
Mr. Goodwin's study table, now a display area for family photos, sits near the living room's large windows. Nearby, a life-size replica of a bust of Abraham Lincoln by Augustus Saint-Gaudens is housed on a specially constructed pedestal. This is the sculpture she received when she won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize in 2006 for her book “Team of Competitors: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.” ”
A framed photo of Mr. Kearns Goodwin with President Johnson and President Obama and a framed photo of Mr. Goodwin with President Kennedy, President Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy hang on the entrance wall. Visitors have to spend more time opening their mouths and stumbling through frequently asked questions. For those who can be convincingly sassy when Ms. Kearns Goodwin hands her the engraved Cartier cuff links Jackie gave Mr. Goodwin as a gift or points out Don Larsen's autographed baseball from her only perfect game. Additional credit is due. Postseason records from the fall of 1956.
Books are everywhere: on tables, on vertical sculpture stands, and on bookcases custom-made to look like Concord shelves.
When Mr. Kearns Goodwin began the process of leaving home, culling his 5,000-volume collection became a sad obsession. Fortunately, many have found a new home in Goodwin Forum, a designated space at the Concord Free Public Library. “It meant that my friends, the books, were still around,” she said.
For two years after moving to Boston, she obsessively (some might say masochistically) played a video (complete with meditative piano accompaniment) that had been commissioned to sell her house. “I don’t know what I’ve done to myself.” she said regretfully. “I watched and started sobbing. And every time I went back to Concord, my heart ached.”
Since then, she has made friends with many of the building's residents, as well as the valet, doorman, concierge and more. “They’re all my friends,” Kearns Goodwin said as she took the elevator from her own apartment to her lobby and made one or two of her new friends.
When she lived in Concord, coming to Boston to go to the symphony or the theater was, frankly, a pain. “Now I can decide at the last minute if I want to go,” she said. “It’s definitely a different phase in my life.”
It's been a while since she's seen the video. And she has no more regrets about her visit to Concord. As Mr. Kearns Goodwin himself said, that misfortune is history.
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